She has contributed pieces to The New Yorker, such as the one linked below.Ĭeridwen Dovey on “What Old Age Is Really Like” In addition to Only The Animals, Ceridwen Dovey is the author of the novel Blood Kin. Think Gunther Grass’s flounder or George Orwell’s pig Napoleon.ĭovey says she, like other writers, uses the imagined voices of animals to awaken “radical empathy” - not only for the animals we humans affect so heedlessly but also for ourselves. But Only The Animals also explores how other writers have used animal characters to talk about the horrors humans inflict on themselves and other beings. Haunting, poignant and sometimes mordantly funny, the stories illumine our relationship to animals and vice versa. Each has been killed in a human conflict of the past century or so and tell the story of their deaths in turn. These are three of the animals whose souls tell their stories in Ceridwen Dovey’s new collection, Only The Animals. Navy writes a letter to Sylvia Plath before perishing in the conflict. A blue mussel on a quest for self-knowledge à la Jack Kerouac’s On The Road is killed during the bombing of Pearl Harbor. Then, a novel from the 1930’s is selling like hotcakes in 2017, as people wonder, “could it happen here”? We talk with Sally Parry, director of the Sinclair Lewis Society about Lewis’ novel about the coming of fascism to America, It Can’t Happen Here (Random House).Ī cat belonging to the French cabaret performer Colette dies in the trenches of World War I. These poignant stories are told by the souls of ten literature-loving animals who were killed in the course of human conflict.

Ceridwen Dovey talks about her wonderful new short story collection Only The Animals ( Farrar, Straus & Giroux).

Only the Animals by Ceridwen Dovey